Diary takes the form of a "coma diary" kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. It is a dark, hilarious, and poignant act of storytelling from America's favorite, most inventive nihilist.

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Lullaby

New York Times best-selling author of Fight Club, which was adapted into a major motion picture, Chuck Palahniuk offers a haunting tale. Winner of the Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Palahniuk is one of the rare literary geniuses who has been able to bridge the gap between a cult following and commercial success.

Rant

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the New York Times best-sellers Fight Club and Lullaby, is known for his edgy novels, and Rant is no exception. Palahniuk presents this fictional biography of Buster "Rant" Casey in a series of vignettes told by the people who knew him best. As intricate as a spider web, Rant succeeds in recounting the story of one man's life only through the eyes of others. But the question remains, "Who was Rant Casey?"

Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.

Pygmy

"Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67, on arrival Midwestern American airport....Code name: Operation Havoc." Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the U.S. disguised as exchange students to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified attack of massive terrorism

Beautiful You

From the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged contemporary male psyche, now comes this novel about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of female pleasure. Beautiful You is Palahniuk's much-anticipated satire of the emerging erotic thriller genre, a mash-up of mommy porn and chick lit à la Sex and the City, and fantasy lit à la Clan of the Cave Bear. Imagine if Ira Levin had a baby with Jean Auel.

Invisible Monsters Remix

Injected with new material, Invisible Monsters Remix fulfills Chuck Palahniuk’s original vision for his 1999 novel, moving a daring satire on beauty and the fashion industry even further into a wildly unique listening experience. Palahniuk’s fashion-model protagonist has it all - boyfriend, career, loyal best friend - until an accident destroys her face, her ability to speak, and her self-esteem. Enter Brandy Alexander, queen supreme, one operation away from becoming a bonafide woman.

Haunted

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.

Damned

“Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison,” declares the whip-tongued 13-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk’s subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a marijuana overdose—and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

Invisible Monsters

She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she is transformed from the beautiful center of attention to an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.

Survivor

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult, is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid-and-collagen-packed media messiah.

Doomed

Madison Spencer, the liveliest, snarkiest dead girl in the universe, continues the adventures in the afterlife begun in Damned. Having somewhat reluctantly escaped from hell, she now wanders the purgatory that is Earth as a ghostly spirit, seeking her do-gooding celebrity parents, fighting the malign control of Satan, recounting the disgracefully funny encounter with her grandfather in a fetid highway rest stop in upstate New York when she - oh, never mind - and climaxing in a rendezvous with destiny on the new, totally plastic continent in the Pacific called, not at all accidentally, Madlantis.

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (Unabridged Selections)

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. These pieces from Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling.

Tell-All

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Fight Club

When a listless office employee (the narrator) meets Tyler Durden, his life begins to take on a strange new dimension. Together they form Fight Club - a secretive underground group sponsoring bloody bare-knuckle boxing matches staged in seedy alleys, vacant warehouses, and dive-bar basements. Fight Club lets ordinary men vent their suppressed rage, and it quickly develops a fanatical following.

Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)

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Timequake

According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.

The Contortionist's Handbook: A Novel

John Dolan Vincent was born with an extra ring finger on one hand. He was an abnormally gifted child with a proclivity for mathematics beyond his years, but he lacked social skills. Childhood ridicule and a difficult family life led him to use his talents in adulthood for criminal acts of forgery. When he starts getting untreatable migraines, his self-medication results in overdosing which sends him repeatedly to the emergency room.

Practical Demonkeeping

In Christopher Moore's ingenious debut novel, we meet one of the most memorably mismatched pairs in the annals of literature. The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and "roads" scholar Travis O'Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets.

Publisher's Summary

Diary takes the form of a "coma diary" kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom; now, after marrying Peter at school and being brought back to once quaint, now tourist-overrun Waytansea Island, she's been reduced to the condition of a resort hotel maid. Peter, it turns out, has been hiding rooms in houses he's remodeled and scrawling vile messages all over the walls - an old habit of builders but dramatically overdone in Peter's case. Angry homeowners are suing left and right, and Misty's dreams of artistic greatness are in ashes. But then, as if possessed by the spirit of Maura Kinkaid, a fabled Waytansea artist of the nineteenth century, Misty begins painting again, compulsively. But can her newly discovered talent be part of a larger, darker plan? Of course it can...

Diary is a dark, hilarious, and poignant act of storytelling from America's favorite, most inventive nihilist.

What the Critics Say

"...[the author's] last minute switching of gears...can turn a darkly ominous story into a source of heart-tugging inspiration." (The New York Times) "A creative, unusual tale...the story is fresh." (Publishers Weekly)

While I must admit that I liked Chuck Palahniuk's "Lullaby" more, I was really drawn into this story - especially by Martha Plimpton's wonderful narration. I simply had to know what the heck was at the root of all the chaos. When all was revealed, I was fairly satisfied. Chuck Palahniuk is clearly one of the most creative (if not twisted) minds of my generation and I look forward to his next novel with great anticipation.

Palahniuk has a knack for writing with a kind of obsessive feverishness that bleeds into the novels and, usually, the readers themselves. A trademark of his previous novels (most especially Choke and Survivor) are twisted, alluring central premises that start out too bizarre to wrap your head around and slowly resolve themselves into a satisfying internally consistent logic. Usually, this process leaves a few plot holes and loose ends in its wake, but what the hell, it's a good ride.
Diary is more mature than Palahniuk's former novels: the thematic structure is strong, the trademark gruesomeness is more subtlely and effectively applied, even the phrase repetitions are more significantly placed, if still used a bit liberally for my taste. But the novel still falls into the trap of biting off more than it can chew, and it raises an awful lot of questions, about the protaganist's husband, the town's history, and its own internal logic, that it never gets around to answering. Palahniuk's fans are used to chalking a few up to surrealism and not letting it get to them, but anyone who hasn't read Fight Club should be prepared to have the hell bugged out of them by the niggling questions.
As for the narration, it's competently done, which is saying a lot for the work: epistolary pieces by ANYONE are tough to narrate without infusing an emotion that obfuscates the significance of the words themselves, and lumping the wry sarcasm of the main character on top of that makes for a fairly difficult narration. I would have preferred less colour to it, but it doesn't get in the way. What did bother me (and may bother others who have read Palahniuk before they listen) is the pace: the author often spends pages spooling out a single twist in the plot amongst a bevy of meaningless detail, a device which works well on the page where you're free to rush through it, heart pounding, to get to the end of the segment, but which is simply torturous in audio form.

Having just finished this story, I must say that this audiobook's greatest strength is it's reading by Martha Plimpton. Although I have read some reviews claiming her monotonous delivery took away from the experience, I feel that it was in line with what to expect from the main character and allowed the listener to delve deeper into her psyche.
Other reviews are correct in saying that the action does not pick up until later into the story. However, once the plot gets up and going, it only gets more and more bizarre as the story continues. Not that this is a bad thing, I just found myself starting to enjoy the narrator's reminiscing and her dark but humorous approach to events that have happened to her more so than the attempts at trying to unravel the mystery that laid before her.
Since the only other Palahniuk novel I have read was "Fight Club", I would be unable to compare this work to his others. However, being familiar with "Fight Club", I'm confident in saying that "Diary" contained the dark humor and bizarre events that one could expect from him. I did read one review that negatively compared this to a soap opera, and as much as I hate to admit it, the story does come across as something you might find on daytime TV, especially after you become familiar with the supporting characters, particularly the mother.
The ending does deliver you a little,"hmmm...that's interesting" feeling, but by no means does it shock you since much of what you've become familiar with leading up to the ending is weird and you know something that is possibly weirder is going to happen in order to wrap the story up.
Overall, I enjoyed the experience despite a few of what I might consider it's shortcomings. I would highly recommend it to someone that is already familiar with Palahniuk's work or is looking to explore something a little different. Since its fairly short (only 8 hours) and it is quite well read, that is almost reason enough to check it out.

The story was fast-paced, interesting, and definitely unusual. I, at least, also thought it was a lot of fun, but in that regard I'm a minority--see other reviews for conflicting opinions about the story's level of grimness.

Palahniuk's distinctive narrative voice was brought out nicely by Martha Plimpton's reading. Last but not least, his talent for ferreting out interesting trivia was particularly on display in this book.

I loved Choke and Lullaby but this book is a dog. He broke the cardinal rule in that you don't care about any of the charactors. The book is depressing with a story that just drags on and on. It is not entertaing in the least. His other books are so creative and different. If you are in a great mood, don't read this book because you will feel horrible being made to wallow in the non stop misery of these pathetic creatures.

It has been several months since I listened to this story, but it has stayed with me. Like other stories by Palahniuk, you feel a little soiled and a little disturbed after reading it, but only because his characters are so honest that you almost become part of the story. It is dark and melancholy, and tragic. I really liked it.

Maybe. I know he's definitely got better work than this out there, but I'm afraid this book might have shown me a side of his writing that turns me off, which I might never be able to unsee if I try to read his other work! Maybe I'll find out if that's true, once I forget about this story enough to come back to him.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Exasperation and frustration, disbelief...not only were there maddeningly bad examples of the writing techniques he used, but I also wanted to take his lead character and shake her! What a push over she was.

Any additional comments?

The author had the makings of a really cool and creepy story here, but botched it with bad writing. This is an example of a writer overusing a gimmick in a story. At first, when he used the explanation of the anatomical features of a human face to help the main characters "recognize themselves" again, it seemed like heavy detail overkill, though I got the point and acknowledged that this gimmick had some poignancy to it. Later, when Chuck continued to use that same gimmick to describe the expressions on the characters faces in long, laborious detail to show how they felt (in a "deep" way) over and over and over again, it seemed like the whole story was becoming a massive waste of time. Then when the story was wrapping up, the heroine's complete powerlessness and inability to do anything but go along with her own demise complicitly, and her unwillingness to recognize that her daughter was a complete sociopath and have her thrown into a mental institution so she wouldn't hurt anyone else, well; those things just made the whole book even more soggy for me. It's not that I need or rely on all my heroines to be the newly stereotypical "strong female role model". It's just that this particular heroine was so completely subdued and resigned that she wouldn't lift a finger to help herself out of an increasingly bad situation. The story just continued to play out all around her, while she passively accepted it all. It all seemed highly contrived and was boring and frustrating. Waste of time!

I am a big fan of Chuck Palahnuik and have read all his books on paperback, except for this one. I knew what to expect from his books, and this one does not let his fans down! The reader was really able to bring it to life and I could not be more pleased with her choice.

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